Strange muscadine season at Tsali Notch

Muscadines are harvested at the Tsali Notch Vineyard in Madisonville by manager J.D. Dalton on Oct. 10, 2012.

Vineyard manager J.D. Dalton runs a Braud picker down rows of Doreen and Sterling variety muscadine grapes Wednesday at the Tsali Notch Vineyard near Madisonville. The berries will be boxed and taken to one of five different wineries. (AMY SMOTHERMAN BURGESS/NEWS SENTINEL)

Sam Sledge helps to load a box of muscadine grapes Wednesday at the Tsali Notch Vineyard near Madisonville. It takes about six months for a grape to mature for picking. (AMY SMOTHERMAN BURGESS/NEWS SENTINEL)

"Feel free to 'pick and pluck' but don't shake vine," a sign cautions.

Dalton has managed the vineyard since 2009.

"I love it," said Dalton, a large man with scraggly gray beard, camouflage overalls and a matching bandanna fashioned into a head wrap. "I couldn't imagine doing anything else."

"We had a great crop last year," he said. "This year, it's not been as great."

Still, he's expecting to harvest about 40 tons of the thick-skinned, juicy grapes.

Last year's bumper crop tipped the scales at more than 100 tons.

Dalton blames squirrelly weather for this year's reduced harvest. "We really didn't have a winter and everything came in a little early," he said. "Then there was a frost, then a month of drought and then all that rain."

In a normal year, "this is the peak of harvest," he said. But this season, it was the third week in September, just before the annual National Muscadine Festival, which he said drew 8,000 people to downtown Sweetwater.

"Last year you could get a hopper full in less than one row," said Sam Sledge, a retiree from Vonore who keeps the vineyard's 38-year-old grape harvester running. "This year, it takes five or six rows."

The machine, operated by Dalton, shakes berries loose, sends them by conveyor up an elevator belt into the hopper.

The grapes are then dumped into large plastic crates that are sealed and trucked to wineries. Most of the muscadines wind up in wineries in Sevier County and Keg Springs Winery in Hampshire, Tenn.

But there are other uses for the dark and bronze-colored muscadines, which Dalton said have "the highest amounts of resveratrol." That chemical compound, found in grape skins, reputedly has several health benefits.

The names of the different varieties are as tasty as the grapes: Doreen, Carlos, Sterling, Noble and Nesbitt.

"Sterling is my favorite," Dalton said. "It has a little bit more of a muscadine twang to it."